Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I first started playing in piano bars for three reasons - to make money, to be in the company of my friends - and also to hook up with young girls. I always knew, even before I played in piano bars, about the effect of my voice.
You can't be different if you look at it. Being gifted is different. I had that in my piano playing. I'm very thankful for that. I'm very aware of that. The style and what I fed is just me. I never worked at it. It just happened.
A lot of people think they should be happy all the time. But the writer understands you need both. You need the whole piano: the richness of the whole human experience. Depression, suffering and anger are all part of being human.
One of the loveliest things about being grown up is the knowledge that never again will I have to go through the miserable business of performing in Mrs. Smedley's Annual Piano Recital at McKinleyville's First Presbyterian Church.
To me, writing and composing are much more like painting, about colors and brushes; I don't use a computer when I write, and I don't use a piano. I'm at a desk writing, and it's very broad strokes and notes as colors on a palette.
I was ballet dancing at four, playing piano by six, and doing commercials by 12. When I was 21, I was on the number one live comedy show in Puerto Rico. I told my parents, 'I'm going to New York to become a performer.' And I left.
My school life was very much a wandering experience. I was having trouble in school and I was not making a lot of friends. So coming home and actually improvising on the piano and just coming up with melodies was an escape for me.
I've been playing piano my whole life, but I'd never tried to understand how compositions are made, really. Try to imagine if you'd loved paintings your whole life but had never painted one. My aspiration now is just to understand.
Just with the basic one guitar, one piano and one vocal and an audience, I think that the intimacy comes through more. People feel much more connected to the song because there's nothing in the way, and I actually enjoy doing that.
...."the sound of a barrel organ rising from the deepest golden vein of the day; two or three bars of a chorus, played on a distant piano over and over again, melting in the sun on the white pavement, lost in the fire of high noon.
Ive heard some people say that Im selling out, but Im not. If I hadnt done Black Radio, and just kept on doing just piano trio stuff, I wouldnt be honest with myself; Id be doing it to please other people. That would be selling out.
After the Second World War, I returned to California to study composition with Darius Milhaud, who wrote wonderful works like 'Le Boeuf sur le Toit' and 'La Cretion du Monde.' I especially enjoy his work for two pianos, 'Scaramouche.
I think for me, I had a long-standing desire to orchestrate the sunrise, and never came up with the right thing on piano. So at a certain moment, I had the revelation that the whole thing would be electronic, not traditional acoustic.
Good Lord's been kind to me, that's all I can say. I wake up in the morning with music in my head a lot of times. I won't say every morning, but I wake up in the morning sometimes with eight bars in my head and I just go to the piano.
I wanted to take up guitar because playing piano is a little harder. Carrying a keyboard around is harder, and finding a real piano is much harder, and I wanted to play live more, so I figured a guitar would be easier to carry around.
I sing songs from the theater and pop songs. When I say 'pop songs,' I mean from the 90's. And I tell jokes. So it's sort of a stand up show meets a concert - not your traditional lounging across a piano cabaret show. It's much looser.
I came from a folk-family background. Although we weren't really the all-singing, all-dancing-around-the-piano folkies or anything like that, there is that idea of singing and playing with your parents and your family and your cousins.
Lindsey [Buckingham] and I went up to Aspen and we went to somebody's incredible house and they had a piano and I had my guitar with me and I went in their living room, looking out over the incredible Aspen sky and I wrote 'Landslide.'
I've always been inspired by female performers and artists who really surround who they are around their voice. For me, it's always been about the voice. I wanna hear someone just sit by a piano, on a stool, and just sing - and that's it!
I started studying music at the age of five and a half. My older sister was taking piano lessons. When her teacher left our apartment, I would get up on the piano bench and start picking out the notes that were part of my sister's lessons
The piano is a bit of a monster because it is this center of Western music and so much has been done with it and it is a fixed pitch instrument. It is a bit like trying to paint because there is the weight of all that has been done before.
Of course, if you think of a European or American household in the '50s, so what were the things that when people started climbing up the ladder, what did they buy? A fridge, a TV, I think piano was the number three item in say '53 or '54.
Of course, it does depend on the people, but sometimes I'm invited places to kind of brighten up a dinner table like a musician who'll play the piano after dinner, and I know you're not really invited for yourself. You're just an ornament.
...he went into the sitting room, put on a Duke Ellington record he had bought after seeing Gene Hackman sitting on the overnight bus in The Conversation to the sound of some fragile piano notes that were the loneliest Harry had ever heard.
This world is not a platform where you will hear Thalberg-piano-playing. It is a piano manufactory, where are dust and shavings and boards, and saws and files and rasps and sandpapers. The perfect instrument and the music will be hereafter.
I started playing piano with a little band in high school. I was terrible. I thought I had absolutely no talent. I couldn't keep time. I only got into McGill, which was a lousy music school, because they were taking American music students.
My goal was to play drums, but my father made me take piano lessons. He told me I needed to learn to read music first, so I took lessons for six years. I thank God that he made me take those lessons, because it taught me a tremendous amount.
I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.
Baldwin is sort of getting to be a bit funny. I don't know what happened, but a few years ago they suddenly went bankrupt and Gibson bought the whole outfit. Since then they haven't seemed to be doing an awfully good job of providing pianos.
Piano playing consists of common sense, heart and technical resources. All three should be equally developed. Without common sense you are a fiasco, without technique an amateur, without heart a machine. The profession does have its hazards.
Well, Mozart is extraordinary not only in that he became virtuoso along the lines of his father, but that he had that compositional gift, that melodic gift. By the time he was four, he was doing piano concertos with harmony in the background.
I looked at the job of piano accompanist. It's a selfless position and generally they are odd people, according to opera singers I talked to. Just like everybody else, they want more from their life, but now their job is to make others shine.
God gave me a gift of singing and playing the piano, and when I do it, it's exciting, of course. But it's more than that. It's truly the way God created me to release my soul and my spirit, to really worship him. ... I'm made to create music.
The piano is the social instrument par excellence... drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment.
I'm familiar to people. They feel comfortable with me. I started in live television. I perform live all the time. I sing with the piano. I sing with a symphony. I can sit and ask questions. I can listen. I'm very comfortable in most situations.
I have always adored Mahler, and Mahler was a major influence on the music of the Beatles. John and me used to sit and do the Kindertotenlieder and Wunderhorn for hours, we'd take turns singing and playing the piano. We thought Mahler was gear.
For the piano and me it is always a blind date! I meet different pianos every single day. I can't take my piano with me like a bassist can take his instrument. So whenever I arrive I am a bit nervous to see what kind of piano is waiting for me.
Love is like playing the piano. First you must learn to play by the rules, then you must forget the rules and play from your heart. If I were pressed to say why I loved him, I feel that my only reply could be: Because it was he, because it was I.
I work with a lot of production that's really positive and contains a lot of soul stuff. Those instrumentals project the happiness out of me. But, sometimes I get a darker beat, with some dark piano or something... and then I'll do darker tracks.
The Piano Lesson' is very sophisticated, easily the most adult or complex material I've attempted. It's the first film I've written that has a proper story, and it was a big struggle for me to write. It meant I had to admit the power of narrative.
'The Piano' is a romantic drama that really made me want to see New Zealand. When I finally did it was every bit as jaw dropping as it looked in the film. It's so virgin and green, it's like God said 'lets try again' and he got it right this time!
Chopin was the first piano composer who knew exactly how to make piano sound reach fullness, radiance and grandness. What to regard and what, by all means, to avoid. Chopin was keenly aware of the overtones and he did take care of them so artfully.
The honest truth is that it was just traumatizing with the piano, with the authority of the piano teacher, getting rapped across the knuckles, and so whenever you put a piece of music in front of me, there's a Pavlovian reaction where it starts off.
I'm a piano player. I never thought of myself as a singer, at all. I was always trying to sound like somebody else. I don't like my own voice, I like Ray Charles, Robert Plant, I like Joe Cocker, Rod Stewart, people that have an edge in their voice.
You can take lessons to become almost anything: flying lessons, piano lessons, skydiving lessons, acting lessons, race car driving lessons, singing lessons. But there's no class for comedy. You have to be born with it. God has to give you this gift.
I've played drums since I was 15. My sisters and I all played instruments. I kind of started with piano and then I actually played saxophone with a jazz band in middle school. So, any knowledge I had of jazz music was from playing alto-sax back then.
I play only classical music. My pianos are my only big indulgence, but they're a necessity. When I'm playing the piano is literally the only time I can be completely abstract and disconnected from the regular world and yet be connected - to my music.
It seems that a lot of people, who haven't known of me as a pianist, think I've just started off as a comedian. And so for them the piano was something extra. But, of course, playing the piano was something that came before all of what's happened now.
He wanted to play accordion on something of mine and I said you can play accordion, but I want you to play piano and organ on some stuff. He came over a couple times a week for two weeks and gave me therapy as to whether I should do The Thorns or not.
I haven't written an awful lot recently, but I think I probably will start again very shortly. Being so much on the road, when you have a couple of weeks off, you're likely to avoid sitting at the piano, and taping, and giving yourself more work to do.